


My Sorrows

by GrrHatLet



Category: Interview With the Vampire (1994)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 06:49:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8194372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrrHatLet/pseuds/GrrHatLet
Summary: A short recollection of Louis' love for Claudia.





	

There are times one ponders their decisions in life. Their mistakes, their shortcomings, the bottomless regrets they yearn to correct all over again. Mine would perhaps be the short-handedness I felt in accepting such a life too emotionally, too fast.

The life of an immortal is not as glamorous as Bram Stroker or any Grecian poet would make it seem to be. There is strife, there is uncertainty, more than anything there is much greater time to live with one’s mistakes. Although the mortal coil held no appeal to me any longer, I misjudged the throes immortality could cure. As long as one exists, one must find worth, significance. Having lost my brother so suddenly I had no inclinations to pursue. Certainly not in the whims of a glorified, golden-haired God.

Was not Lucifer beautiful at his debut?

These “gifts,” these insights, this dominion over those I once called equal held nothing like compensation. What had once been a saturation of emptiness and woe now drowned into a bleak flood of horror and revulsion. My detachment had been exported for trepidation, and my comeuppance was only beginning.

Lestat had not been the reprieve I had yearned. Though there is no doubt of my love for him, the balm which would save me from mortal anguish had not been found in his enchanting promises. His soft whispered words. His frustration only grew with my dissatisfaction, but as great as my melancholy was his persistence was just as strong.

I remember when she was found. Small, dirty, and helpless. So trusting—enough to walk into a stranger’s arms and beg him for reprieve. Still young and unenlightened of the many dangers in this world, having just walked into one herself.

It was not of intention, what I did to her, but that does not alleviate the matter any less. I am accountable, and forever hold myself as accomplice.

I could not have imagined Lestat would do what he did next. There she lay on the bed, peaceful as if in slumber. I can still remember the way the candlelight traced her golden hair. The plump bow of her lips. The fingers on her little hands. Even alive, she was beautiful.

One need not question _why_ she came into my life, that point has been rather exhausted. I can still remember wanting to run my fingers through her hair, trail my touch down her motionless forearm, dire to see any signs of breath, of vitality.

Her face had contorted into a grimace of surprise and pain, healthily dosed with confusion. But a natural she was at being accustomed to our ways. The mind of a child does learn quickly, I suppose…

She was as dependent on us for nurturing and affection as Lestat and I were upon the mortals for sustenance. Eager for someone to call “father,” to fill the role of a departed mother.

And in her presence, her need, I began to find my hollow existence take on new meaning.

I found joy in her happiness, her triumphs. The way her little hands held my face as we found ourselves appraising the other. Her voice a gleeful harmony of whimsical fascination.

I found purpose in rearing her, teaching her. Her little eyes wondering the halls with her childlike curiosity, her mind an endless torrent of questions and discoveries. She would beg me—or on rare occasions, Lestat—to show her the ways of our kind. I had as little knowledge as she did, but regaled her with stories of shared coffins and rats. This would bring joyous delight to her little face, and I would feel a warmth thought to be lost long ago.

There were times when she would regard us, suddenly and silently. What she was pondering, I do not know. Her thoughts were a whirlwind of inquiry, confusion, indeterminacy, and the onset of frustration. Now that I mull on it, so long from then, she might have been assessing why we were so well-grown—while she remained how she was.

It was only when we found the corpses that trouble arose.

Soon her violent malice which had been formerly saved for those she hunted was turned on us. She began making accusations, firing questions which Lestat would not answer, flying into a rage until one of us bodily stopped her. Her little frame would writhe with even greater fury at the predicament. On rare occasions, she would burst into sobs, and her little body would be brought out of its restraint and held close in some offer of comfort. Neither Lestat and I had said it, but I believe that—even to a meager extent on his part—we both felt a piteous ache for her.

Soon she was no longer the fragile little girl we had saved from the indiscriminant claws of death. She began making demands which would disrupt the hair-thin peace of the house. Would rebel for its own sake. Our relationship never weakened, but devastatingly morphed into something darker than it once was. The light-hearted and gay excitation gone without chance of return.

Her thoughts became so unlike that of a young child; as her physical form remained unchanged we were aghast to learn thirty years had gone by. Her expressions ill-fitting for such a small girl. Any mortal would have viewed such tenor as insolence, but I could not fault her for reacting to what she now knew. Resenting what she had become. No matter how I tried to console her, a world of anger and helplessness remained behind those two radiant eyes.

Her soft touch forever remains etched in my hand. The small curve of her temple nestling itself between my jaw and shoulder.

I do not try to remember her as she was as a true child nor as what she could have been in the body of a woman. I forever hold her as everything she was, not unlike our time together—unkindly short as it had been. Not without my love. Not without my memory.  

Lestat once raved I was in love with my sorrows. Perhaps…

…but what if these sorrows are all I have left?


End file.
